Insights into the Workings of the Guardian: Dennis MacEoin gets the thumbs-down

The Guardian, a paper whose obsession with Israel was illustrated during the Lebanon War of 2006 when they bragged about having 19 correspondents covering various aspects of the conflict (more than any other place or country in the world; apparently few to spare for Congo, or Darfur, or Sri Lanka), has just rejected an article by Denis MacEoin, the editor of the Middle East Quarterly, because they’ve published too much already on the subject.

But it illustrates one of the fundamental aspects of Western media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict: when the slanders are out, the MSNM runs the story; when they prove false, the press falls silent. Raphael Israeli already pointed this out in a close study of the Jenin “poisoning” scandal of 1983, one of the early episodes in the history of Pallywood.

MacEoin turned to CIFWatch, one of the most exemplary “shadow sites” of a major MSNM production (Comment is Free), which documents and refutes the systematic channeling of anti-Semitic themes via the socially acceptable avatar of anti-Zionism. Here is MacEoin’s piece via the internet, just the kind of thing that could not happen in the 20th century.

Those of you who take an interest – and, in most cases, that’s going to be a malign interest – in matters relating to Israel, Palestine, and the strangely lovable terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah – will have been greatly stirred by the troubling episode of the boat that tried to break a blockade imposed by a state acting within its legal rights, but which ended up with nine of its activists dead. What a rush to judgement this has been. Within hours of the event, half the world had decided it knew all the facts and wasn’t going to back down, regardless of any new facts that may come to light. I have some of those for you, but wait a little. What you need first is context, something in short supply in discussions of these matters.

If, like myself, you have a serious interest in Middle East affairs, you can’t be unaware of an accusation that has infected the Arab world and beyond. It’s very simple: take a war (any war will do), a revolution (ditto), a tragedy, and, lo and behold, the Jews are behind it. Here’s a string of such claims from a bog-standard white supremacist website [Warning hate site]. And here’s a representative (and much shortened) statement from Egyptian general Hasan Sweilem:

‘The Jews stood behind wars and internal strife, and that caused European rulers to expel them and kill them. For example, the Crusader armies, passing through the Rhine basin on their way east, massacred them and burned their houses as an act of repentance to their God. When the Crusaders entered Jerusalem, they collected the Jews in a synagogue and burned them live. Their kin in Russia suffered a similar fate….They were expelled from France, England, Germany, Hungary, Belgium, Slovakia, Austria, Holland, and finally from Spain, after they underwent the Inquisition trials for their conspiracy to penetrate Christian society like a Trojan horse….The Jewish conspiracy to take over Europe generated civil revolutions, wars, and internal strife….The Cromwell Revolution failed in 1649 in England, following the Jewish conspiracy to drag England into several wars in Europe….Then the French Revolution broke out, which the Jews had planned, based on the first conference of their rabbis and interest-loaners that had been convened by the first Rothschild in 1773 in order to take over all the world resources….That conference adopted twenty-four protocols, including the uprooting of the belief in God from the hearts of the Gentiles, distracting people by distributing among them literature of heresy and impurity, destruction of the family and eradication of all morality….’

The Jews went on, he says, to start the First and Second world wars and to lay the foundations of both communism and Nazism.

The thing about these claims is that everything bad that has ever happened to Jews has been legitimate defence by those whom the Jews have harmed. The Holocaust, for example, was the deserved punishment for a people mired in every sort of treachery and hatred for mankind.
A lot of this is rooted in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a plagiarized fake that is still a bestseller in the Muslim world. And just as European anti-Semitism joined forces with existing Islamic tropes of evil Jews, taken from the Qur’an and the life of Muhammad, it has mutated and found expression in anti-Israel speech. Why otherwise did protesters on the streets of European cities following the 2008-09 war on Gaza chant ‘Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas’? And why did activists on board the Mavi Marmara sing ‘Khaybar, Khaybar, Ya Yahud, Jaysh Muhammad Sa-ya‘ud’? ‘Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews: the army of Muhammad will return.’ Khaybar was the last of several Jewish settlements attacked by Muhammad and his forces, after which the Jewish inhabitants were either massacred or sold into slavery or deported. Just what sort of ‘humanitarian activists’ issued this threat on board a ship carrying ‘aid’?

The Mavi Marmara is just the latest in a string of allegations that take for granted Jewish or Israeli malignity. The fabled ‘massacre’ of Deir Yassin in 1948 has remained in anti-Israeli propaganda, despite the fact that a host of Arabs, many eye-witnesses, have admitted that a wartime battle was exaggerated out of all proportion both to embolden and to frighten the native population. The other famous ‘massacre’ was at Jenin refugee camp in 2002 still lives in memory as a butchery of hundreds or even thousands of innocent Palestinian. According to one Palestinian source, it was the ‘massacre of the 21st century’. In fact, a UN enquiry established that 52 Palestinian fighters died, along with Israeli soldiers. According to the Weekly Standard, ‘That same day, you could hear breathless reports of the supposed Israeli atrocities in Jenin being spread by Palestinian sources on NPR, CNN, and elsewhere.’ The old adage holds true: ‘A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.’

That’s exactly what happened last Monday. There was a rush to judgement that took the world by storm. The UN Security Council was in session almost before the boats reached Ashdod. There had been no time to hold an enquiry, to question the commandos, or to question the activists. The Jews, as usual, were responsible for everything, even the vicious attacks on their own troops. But now that a few days have gone by, the picture is changing. On Tuesday, the IDF found a cache of ceramic bulletproof vests, night-vision goggles and gas masks on board the Mavi Marmara. As well as these, the ship contained large quantities of metal and wooden batons, powerful catapults (with marbles to use as stones), many of which were used to attack Israeli soldiers. A group of fifty passengers have actually or possible terror connections, others are linked to extremist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and possibly al-Qaeda. Many were carrying very large (and identical) sums of money on their persons. And some have admitted that they had been organized into cells throughout the ship and had gone in, prepared to fight and die as martyrs.

The Reutersgate 2.0 showed how the MSNM will routinely crop the evidence so it can fit into the “Palestinian David vs. Israeli Goliath” frame. Cropping happens all the time, and, like this rejection by the Guardian, it does so in ways that preserve the narrative frame.

Since the navy’s May 31 takeover of the Turkish-Hamas flotilla , Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his advisors have deliberated around the clock about how to contend with the US-led international stampede against Israel. But their ultimate decision to form an investigatory committee led by a retired Supreme Court justice and overseen by foreign observers indicates that they failed to recognize the nature of the international campaign facing Israel today.

Led by US President Barack Obama, the West has cast its lot with Hamas against Israel.

It is not surprising that Obama is siding with Hamas. His close associates are leading members of the pro-Hamas Free Gaza outfit. Obama’s friends, former Weatherman Underground terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and William Ayres participated in a Free Gaza trip to Egypt in January. Their aim was to force the Egyptians to allow them into Gaza with 1,300 fellow Hamas supporters. Their mission was led by Code Pink leader and Obama fundraiser Jodie Evans. Another leading member of Free Gaza is former US senator from South Dakota James Abourezk.

All of these people have open lines of communication not only to the Obama White House, but to Obama himself.

[The following, by Denis MacEoin, is crossposted from CiF Watch.] Denis MacEoin is the editor of the Middle East Quarterly. This article was originally submitted to Brian Whitaker for publication in the Guardian and was rejected by him on the……

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This is news: Moderate Muslims, the darlings of the George W. Bush Administration’s foreign policy, don’t matter, or so Obama has concluded. Ever since he was on the campaign trail Obama has promised to reach out to Iran and Syria, state sponsors of terror and Hezbollah’s patrons, and now the reason why is clear: because he believes that it’s Middle East extremists who call the shots. Someday soon, the Obama Administration is going to reach out to Hezbollah, as well as other terrorist organizations, in Afghanistan, Gaza, and elsewhere in the Muslim world.
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In any case, Obama sees, correctly, that the real choice isn’t between moderates and extremists, but between cutting a deal with the extremists or making war against them. The fact is that a war against all the extremists in the Muslim world—Sunni and Shia, from the Persian Gulf to Western North Africa—is effectively a war against Islam. And a decades-long war of civilizations is not a war that an economically damaged United States can afford to wage. We have neither the money, nor the manpower, nor the will. A total war of the kind that appears to be on offer would change U.S. society in ways that are unimaginable and would make the Bush years look like an idyllic holiday. Our few remaining allies—with the exception of Israel—would no longer wish to fight beside us and would make deals of their own, if they already haven’t.

So, instead, we’re going to bargain with the actors who have the final say over war and peace: the extremists.
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Looking back to the origins of the United States’ blue-water navy is a reminder that the founding fathers judged that fighting, rather than paying tribute, was what best suited the character of the American people. And there’s little doubt that U.S. citizens will again rebel against policymakers who have chosen appeasement, especially since the extremists will negotiate by killing more of us, in the streets of U.S. cities as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is unclear whether the political damage that the incumbent will suffer because his countrymen are dying is sufficient to change his thinking, which is that it is more cost efficient for a weakened United States to buy off extremists than it is to run the rest of the world at the end of a gun.

But negotiating with extremists will look like war, just that only one side will be fighting while the other side—the United States—tries to stop the bloodshed by petitioning the extremists to accept more ransom. The way Obama sees it, the upside is that it will not be a war without end, like the war on terror. All the extremists in the Muslim world want is money and the power that will flow their way as the consequence of the U.S. withdrawal from the Persian Gulf. The faster the United States leaves, the cheaper the cost. This is why the Jewish state is isolated today and why Washington stands with her only reluctantly: Distancing ourselves from Israel is part of the deal we are preparing to strike.

The most dangerous one of the demasked female-rats of the Migration Board called Fadime Bakir who ever gets paid to all cases, there she still sitting as “staff”, but she plays a role as “legalized document-seller” businesswoman … Maybe she shares with her decisionmaker-chiefs as always, the thief enormous support “from above” in this corrupt ridden Migration Board … Fadime BAKIR ripped off all poor asylumseekers and also betrayed swedish people, too…
There are lots of legal changes through time even EU rules, the United Nations’ conventions, plus humanitarian (known as sore) conditions, flexible practice items should also apply to my situation. To be realistic enough to see the case as a whole.
The EU authorities should be informed right, what is the purchase / sale behind closed doors in this corrupt machinery of this carefully! It’s a complete system and how it based, they pondered how so this is going on, is not surprising that the system is of course going wrong, not least my case. Look at what is revealed medial sources including areas such as ‘Officials fooled — asylumseekers were only a few bucks a fine “; quite shameful ridiculously over powered consent of the Swedish people, at least not to violate the victim … “Official” media says, but “it’s a short growing woman” in reality. Someone should dare to speak the truth, at least that level that I describe here … Unfortunately, this form of government has a lack of honest independent figures, not least honest legal professionals. In fact: whole system TOTALLY CORRUPTED and therefore it’s not strange; completely involved staff defense each other instead demasking each other! Migration Baord is the most involved board of thus so-called “fraud ship”; they are sailing all together like druged idio-mass-flock. But the lack of courageous honesty really educated jurists to act up put an end to this misery, especially officers extorting money from asylumseekers poor bewildered victims! It is not difficult at all amazingly what I mean: just in case I want to stress that I should not have administrator type Fadime BAKIR& her interacting inside the system that requires payments even though she gets a monthly salary of the same system. It does not take those torturers who would handle anything. Best case to my binder not dirty ones. It is my greatest desire, should be respected. As long as you keep such a stinking official, there will be no surprise that I also sacrificed even if I manage to “chase the bird with your mouth” … Something was rotten in the beginning, now you see just the tip of the iceberg, of course it includes my situation so that this result shows the quality … Should I also buy fake ID card / passport counterfeit / fake marriages etc which revealed the figures committed?! No! Should I also accept the sum in the above-mentioned short stature demanded handy?! No! I insist to tell the truth and therefore I demand now that the one true independent field takes the case, judge the case fairly! It is my desire to get the chance, at least at the level of treatment as the favored people, completely positive, of course!
With my best regards!
Yours sincerely
c/o BERGLUND
Sollentunavägen 199,
191 35 Sollentuna
C. O. BERGLUND
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